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Weak XXIII

5 June 2019

No. 1,169 (cartoon)

I can feel my leg moving again!

You’re still paralyzed; those are maggots.

6 June 2019

All of My Negatives

My favorite definition of being old is when you look back instead of forward.

I’m thinking of old people in their thirties who remember their school days as the last time they had life in their lives. And then there’s Bob Cameron who was still working on his next project in his nineties when he was blind in one eye and could barely see out of the other. (He died a few months after going completely blind; he was ninety-eight.)

I wanted to be famous when I was young and much more stupid than I am now. Thanks to my anonymity, I’ve spent no time revisiting and rehashing my first forty-some years of work. I can’t imagine the day when I’d want to digitize and/or print my old negatives and transparencies, so I donated them to the Internet Archive. I’ll have access to them so I can revisit the past, but I hope the rest of my life is more interesting and rewarding than that.

All of My Negatives fit comfortably in three boxes; they’re en route to one of the Archive’s warehouses where I’ll probably never see them again. They won’t be missed.

I included a note ...

Hello, Archivist of the Future,

This is the first of three boxes of all of the negatives and transparencies I’ve made in my life; the dates range from 1973 to 2000 or so. They’re completely unorganized; sorry about that.

They’re all copyright David Glenn Rinehart; all rights reserved. Unless otherwise specified in my will, after my death all rights are owned by the Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94118.

This box was sealed on 6 June 2019.

That’s all, folks!

The end.

(Probably.)

7 June 2019

D-Day Remembrance

Isabella was shocked to hear that the German chancellor joined in the D-Day remembrance today.

I said shocked!

Youngins these days don’t know nothin’ about nothin’ including history. Doesn’t everyone recognize we can’t really have a proper world war without the Germans?! It just wouldn’t be the same without them.

8 June 2019

Some Things Never Change

Bernie said Dahlia is miserable at work; that’s why it’s called work. She’s obsessed with getting ahead in the corporate rat race and blinded by ambition. I have no idea why anyone who’s not a rodent would enter a lifelong rat race, but that’s not what I’m writing about today ...

Bernie told me that he passed along an old observation from Jean de La Bruyère, who died over three hundred years ago. “A slave has but one master; an ambitious man has as many masters as there are people who may be useful in bettering his position.”

That sounded familiar, so I checked my notes and found this ...

“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing.”

Lucius Annaeus Seneca dba Seneca the Younger said that almost two millennia ago. The song remains the same, but Dahlia’s not interested in hearing it.

9 June 2019

The Complete OK Computer

The English musical ensemble Radiohead released the album OK Computer in 1997. The recording enjoyed critical and popular acclaim, but not from me. The lads were on to something, but they only took fifty-three minutes and twenty-one seconds to explore it, hardly enough time to do or say anything of substance.

I was obviously not the only one who noted the work’s deficiencies; some nefarious ne’er-do-wells purloined the entire eighteen hours of recordings and made them freely available. Yet another example of why everyone needs an editor.

I wonder if all of the people who told me I should publish every photo from a session—including the ones with the wrong focus, exposure, composition, et cetera—just might be right?

Nah ...

10 June 2019

International Exhibition (Thirtieth Anniversary)

Here’s where my International Exhibition was shown in 1989:

The Hermitage Museum, Leningrad, USSR
The International Center of Photography, New York, NY, USA
The V.I. Lenin Museum, Moscow, USSR
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA
The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, USA
The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, USA
The Simon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA

For the first time in three decades, I decided to show it again:

International Exhibition, Internet Archive, San Francisco, CA, USA

Here’s a description of the show. In 1989, photographed a stack of books containing every negative I had. I superimposed a grid of crop marks and copy over the image, applied a sheet of adhesive to the back of the resulting print, then chopped it up into dozens of tiny twenty-four by thirty-six-millimeter prints. The rest was easy.

In retrospect, I should have done a better job with the written content:

This is part of an international exhibition of photographs by David Rinehart.

The Visible Spectrum
2660 Third Street #205
San Francisco, CA 94107 USA
415·550-1605

©1989 David Rinehart · All Rights Reserved

I shut down my company decades ago, and have had nothing to do with that address or phone number since.

Wanna show your work at any ostensibly prestigious institution? It’s simple; just adhere a diminutive piece of your work to the gallery wall of your choice in some highfalutin exhibition space and Bob’s your uncle. Then you too can have an impressive list of exhibitions on your curriculum vitae, and appreciate how silly merely looking good on paper feels.

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©2019 David Glenn Rinehart